Definitely an under-rated comedy. But I also wonder if there's more going on than comedy? The whole structure - Neil's journey home with trials, tribulations and odd characters detaining him, ending with the confrontation with a rival suitor, seemed to allude strongly to the Odyssey. There were strange elements too: why the final flashback to the police station, with the pan back in 'tunnel vision' style from the dark fading scene, before we see another, unknown, man finding himself naked in Scotland (and presumably beginning a similar journey)? And there was the constant allusion to death: the old woman rowing Neil to the mainland; Carmen's speech about death being the natural state of things; Neil's confrontation with the gunman; and the autopsy dream sequence. I kept thinking of "Jacob's Ladder" (whose hero, like Neil, spent the film nursing a painful injury, had a hallucinatory sequence of being vivisected while denying he was dead, and ended up embracing death). Are the events in "Staggered" Neil's near-death fabulation?
